Whether you’re feeling nauseated or suffering a strange pain in your gut, little can be more stressful than sitting in a packed waiting room.

Coos County hospitals, like hospitals across the country, have had varying success minimizing the wait over the years.

Because each hospital measures wait times using different methods and because the hospitals differ in their type, it isn’t fair to rank them against each other. However, it is possible to map trends within them.

Colquitt Regional Medical Center has adopted a procedure that will limit dispensing and prescribing narcotic medications in its emergency room.

The hospital’s new policy is to prescribe no narcotics in the emergency department but to refer patients to specialists who can better evaluate and treat their conditions. The new policy is designed to treat patients in the appropriate setting rather than the emergency department, which is specifically designed to treat emergency cases.

Colquitt Regional’s new procedure will channel patients to physicians who can perform a more thorough evaluation and allow the emergency department to provide a higher quality of care and better access to patients needing emergency care, according to Dena Zinker, MSN, RN, assistant vice president of nursing.

The Kalispell Police Department received a report of a nude man and woman walking down an alley off Third Avenue East. The woman was holding her hands in front of her as if meditating, and when confronted by police told them only that she wanted to go to the emergency room, although she wouldn’t give a reason why.

Also in the Roundup: The Flathead County Sheriff’s Office received a report from a Kalispell resident who said someone is intentionally poisoning him because he witnessed an attempted murder.

Wayne Nelson was one heart beat away from missing his 79th birthday, and his medical miracle began with his wife Donna.

Late one night, she complained of severe abdominal pain. Wayne rushed her to the emergency room at Blake Medical Center in Bradenton, where she was diagnosed with appendicitis and needed emergency surgery.

The worried husband and father called his daughter to let her know, not realizing he was about to have his own life-threatening emergency.

Donna describes watching Wayne as he spoke on the phone.

“All of a sudden, he was talking, he started speaking garble. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, and I looked over and he was sliding out of his chair, ” she said.

Wayne’s heart suddenly and unexpectedly stop beating. The emergency team at the hospital stabilized Wayne and revived his heart.

The results demonstrate that hospitals using the Baldrige process exhibit signiicantly higher rates of improvement in balanced organizational performance than non-Baldrige hospitals. And hospitals using the Baldrige process are signiicantly more likely than peers to become 100 Top Hospitals award winners, thereby achieving performance equal to or better than the top 3 percent. Although the Baldrige process and the 100 Top Hospitals statistical measurements are quite different, the results of this study suggest that the methods are complementary and identify similarly high-achieving organizations.

With quality performance tied to hospital reimbursements and revenue, leaders are using those same scores to decide how to pay their physicians. Fifty-seven percent of healthcare executives and clinical leaders use quality metrics as an incentive for physician compensation, with 50 percent now using patient satisfaction as incentives, according to a HealthLeaders Media report released this week.